Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

Welcome to the website of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.
Launched in 1963, the Foundation was established to carry forward
Russell's work for peace, human rights and social justice. Forty
years later, it continues to do so.

Here, you will also find information about our journal,
The
Spokesman, and links to our publications website
Spokesman
Books.

Even unto Gaza

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine met in extraordinary session in Brussels on 25 September 2014, a month after an extended ceasefire was called following Israel’s latest, bloodiest, and most protracted onslaught on the people of the Gaza Strip …The jury heard compelling eyewitness and expert testimony. We feature the written submissions of an Israeli and a Palestinian, Eran Efrati and Mohammed Omer, who also gave testimony in person and answered questions from members of the jury. Mr Efrati, a former soldier, recounted the destruction of Shuja’iyya, in the East of Gaza City, the scale of which shocked seasoned military analysts, while Mr Omer, a journalist, focused on Khuza’a in the southern Gaza Strip, which suffered massive damage under Israeli fire …Two other eyewitnesses, Ashraf Mashharawi and Raji Sourani, despite sustained attempts to do so, were prevented from travelling from Gaza to Brussels to testify in person … The Tribunal’s preliminary findings propose a range of actions at different levels, including that all European Union member states recognise the state of Palestine.

This new issue of
The Spokesman
can be bought from our sister website.

Russell Tribunal - September 25th 2014

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine's Emergency Session on Israel's Operation Protective Edge held yesterday in Brussels has found evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of murder, extermination and persecution and also incitement to genocide.

The Jury reported: 'The cumulative effect of the long-standing regime of collective punishment in Gaza appears to inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group in Gaza.'

'The Tribunal emphasises the potential for a regime of persecution to become genocidal in effect, In light of the clear escalation in the physical and rhetorical violence deployed in respect of Gaza in the summer of 2014, the Tribunal emphasises the obligation of all state parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention ‘to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.’

The Jury heard evidence from eyewitnesses to Israeli attacks during the Gaza war 2014 including journalists Mohammed Omer, Max Blumenthal, David Sheen, Martin Lejeune, Eran Efrati and Paul Mason, as well as surgeons Mads Gilbert, Mohammed Abou Arab, Genocide Expert Paul Behrens, Col Desmond Travers and Ivan Karakashian, Head of Advocacy and Defence for Children International.

In terms of the crime of incitement to genocide, the tribunal received evidence 'demonstrating a vitriolic upswing in racist rhetoric and incitement' during the summer of 2014. 'The evidence shows that such incitement manifested across many levels of Israeli society, on both social and traditional media, from football fans, police officers, media commentators, religious leaders, legislators, and government ministers.'

NATO: No thanks!

MESSAGE: The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd.

The leaders of 28 NATO member countries and others gather for a summit meeting in Newport, the third city of Wales, on
4-5 September 2014. For days together, this small city has been besieged while fences, gates and barricades are erected to protect those attending. The cost is substantial, and there is considerable inconvenience to the people of Newport and to the activists of the international peace movement who have organised a counter-summit there. NATO’s uselessness is never more apparent than when it rudely disrupts people’s lives in order to exult in 65 costly years of existence ...

Mass arrests of trade unionists in Turkey

PEACE IN KURDISTAN CAMPAIGN
Statement 22 February 2013

It is with dismay and outrage that once again we learn of yet another round of mass arrests in Turkey. This time the victims of this repressive police action, which has become all too commonplace in the country in recent months, are trade union activists and union officials.

Ayşe Berktay

Ayşe Berktay has written a letter from Bakırköy Prison accepting her PEN award. The letter can be
read in full here.

Peace and Democracy Party (BDP)

The Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have prepared this
Bulletin, following the end of mass hunger strikes amongst predominantly Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey's prisons, on 18 November. The BDP has 36 members of the Turkish Parliament, elected mainly with the support of Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority, which exceeds 20 million people. Ayse Berktay, long time activist in the Turkish peace movement and a good friend of the Russell Foundation, writes from her prison in Istanbul, where she has been held since October 2011.)

Gaza Emergency

On 20 November 2012, the House of Commons debated the Middle East, at the request of backbenchers. We begin this selection from the debate with Andy Slaughter’s percipient remarks about the pending mass killing of many more innocents in Gaza, should Israel proceed with its ground invasion. Arbuthnot and Ottoway, Select Committee Chairmen, marked low points in the Debate. Hague rather distanced himself from the more partisan comments of the many Friends of Israel in the House. He knows Hamas won the 2006 elections in Gaza by a street, and that they are serious interlocutors. That’s why Michael Ancram talked with them at length after that victory. (see Spokesman 97)

Daily in the common Prison
else enjoyn’d me,
Where I a Prisoner chain’d,
scarce freely draw
The air imprison’d also,
close and damp,
Unwholsom draught …
John Milton,
Samson Agonistes

(Spokesman 96)

Russell Tribunal on Palestine - NYC
October 6–7, 2012

Eyewitness at the New York
Session of the Russell Tribunal on PalestineBy Tony Simpson

Leila Shahid and Raji Sourani, two Palestinians, were prevented from attending the New York Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which met in the Grand Hall of Cooper Union during the first weekend of October 2012 with hundreds of people attending over the two days. They weren’t granted visas in good time by the US authorities. Their absence denied the Tribunal direct testimony from Gaza (Sourani maintains the human rights centre there), as well as the presence of one of its initiators (Khalid, together with Nurit Peled of Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Parents for Peace, and Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation issued the initial call for the Tribunal in 2008).
(READ
FULL REPORT)

Message to New York Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine from the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

Bertrand Russell died on 2 February 1970, in his 98th year. Two days
earlier he had composed a message to the International Conference of
Parliamentarians, who were about to meet in Cairo whilst Israeli air
raids reached deep into Egyptian territory. Russell’s message was read
to the assembled parliamentarians on the day after his sudden death. He
had remarked that:

‘The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was
“given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new
State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people
were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers
have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this
spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees
have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the
denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No
people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from
their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to
accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just
settlement of the refugees in their homelands is an essential ingredient
of any just settlement in the Middle East.’

Ayşe Berktay imprisoned in Turkey

A political purge is under way in Turkey. Since 2009, thousands of activists from the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have been arrested in police raids and interned in extended pre-trial detention. Following elections in June 2011, the BDP currently has 36 members of the Turkish Parliament, elected mainly with the support of Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority. (READ MORE)

***

Ayşe Berktay is still in prison in Turkey. Her case,
with more than 200 others, is adjourned until October. On Thursday
evening,
Tony Simpson had a chance to talk about the Russell
Foundation and Ayse on
Haberturk TV. He had spent the day at the trial next to the
Silivri Prison complex (pictured above), which houses 11,000 prisoners
and has at least 17 watchtowers.

Ayşe
was one of the main animators of the World Tribunal
on Iraq, which held sessions in Brussels, Tokyo
and New York before concluding in Istanbul in 2005.
She proposed the Tribunal in 2002, at a meeting
of the European Network for Peace and Human Rights,
which the Russell Foundation convened in the European
Parliament in Brussels. She works as a translator,
and her Turkish translation of
Black Beauty
has been widely acclaimed.

***

Eyewitness in TurkeyPunishing the Innocent in the Name of Justice
By Eman Ahmed Khammas

What we are witnessing in Silivri (near Istanbul) nowadays is simply a scar of shame on the forehead of humanity. Otherwise, philosophers, theorists, humanists, law makers, activists should work on finding new definitions for all the values we were taught in school, above all justice, because what is happening here is using the devices of law and justice to criminilize
and punish the innocent, in the name of peace, justice and, of course,
fighting terrorism ... (READ
THE FULL ARTICLE)

***

Press Release - 25 June 2012

International delegation to attend trial of Ayşe Berktay (Hacimirzaoglu) in Turkey

As participants in the (former) World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) network, we have now formed an international delegation to observe the trial of Ayşe Berktay. She helped found the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2003, and was a principal organizer of its culminating session in Istanbul, which took place in June 2005. We know Ayşe Berktay to be a person of great integrity and honesty. She is not a terrorist, but an idealist who is committed to peace and democracy.

The Greek people choose

Tony Simpson

The clean lines of the Parthenon, high up on the Acropolis, stood out clearly in the early March sunshine. Down below, outside the Greek Parliament, a man pushed his supermarket shopping trolley down the hill towards Syntagma Square, where much of the public drama of Greece’s contemporary tragedy has played out prior to the recent general election. Balanced across the trolley was a discarded metal bath, on its way to be sold for a few euros. So it is that some residents of Athens eke out their existence in 2012.

Inside the Parliament, I met with Alexis Tsipras, the 38-year-old leader of SYNASPISMOS, part of the SYRIZA Coalition of the Left, which is attracting support from increasing numbers of Greek voters, as the general election on 6 May clearly showed. SYRIZA won almost 17% of the vote, up more than 12 percentage points since 2009 when it polled 4.6%. Now it has 52 MPs, four times more than previously. This vote put SYRIZA within just 2% of the Conservatives, New Democracy, the largest party. Under the Greek electoral system, the largest party automatically receives an additional 50 seats, so New Democracy, although its vote declined by 14 percentage points on Sunday, now has 108 Members of Parliament, an increase of 17 since 2009! This 50 seat ‘bonus’ masks the sharp decline of the Conservatives who, having lost the 2009 election with 33.5% of the vote, have now lost a further two-fifths of their voters. A large part of the Conservative loss (10.5% of the vote) went to the Independent Greeks, a new party on the democratic right, which campaigned on a staunchly anti-IMF platform. PASOK, the Socialist party, saw its vote decline by 30 percentage points (from 43.9% in 2009 to 13.2%) and its Parliamentary representation shrink from 160 to 41. The KKE Communist Party’s vote rose slightly to 8.5%, adding five more MPs to make a Parliamentary Group of 26. The new Democratic Left party, which split from SYRIZA in 2009 and absorbed some of PASOK’s recent losses, won 6% of the vote and 19 seats. Several smaller parties, including the Greens and the Social Contract (a splinter from PASOK, on similar lines to the Independent Greeks’ splinter from New Democracy) collectively received some 19% of the popular vote, but individually received insufficient support to cross the 3% threshold required to enter the Parliament. The nationalist LAOS (5.6% in 2009) also dropped to 2.9% and failed to win representation, while Golden Dawn, an anti-immigration fascistic party, polled almost 7%, gaining 21 seats as it entered Parliament for the first time. Turnout was about 65%, so that one in three electors didn’t cast a ballot. This drop in voter participation is partly attributed to economic difficulties which prevent the poorest voters from travelling from larger population centres to their own towns to vote.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine can promote peace, truth and reconciliation

Opportunities
to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations
are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed
this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across
North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus
that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in
the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination.
All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core
rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed
there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.

Russell Tribunal on Palestine

“No Peace Without Justice”
The London Session of the Russell Tribunal
on Palestine

By Frank Barat and Michael Mansfield QC

Countless United Nations Security Council
and General Assembly resolutions have been
passed and violated; The Goldstone Report
has been attacked and dismissed and the
recent UNHRC fact finding Mission on the
Freedom Flotilla incident, condemning Israel’s
actions in the strongest possible terms,
has been rejected as biased by Israel and
was hardly mentioned in the higher spheres
of the UN. The reason most often given to
explain this lack of political action being
that ‘it will harm the peace process.’

We are made to believe that the Israel/Palestine
conflict is a never ending one and that,
when it comes to this issue, International
Law is irrelevant.

But civil society knows better. This conflict
is about International Law and nothing else.
Not harming the peace process means not
harming more than 17 years (from the Oslo
agreement in 1993 until now) of settlement
building, bombing, murder and assassination,
Israeli army aggression, land grab, US vetoes,
dispossessions and humiliation of the Palestinians
living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.

Civil society also knows that under a facade
of bland statements ‘condemning’ Israel’s
actions, the EU, the USA and the whole international
community are in fact actively complicit
in those crimes.